


in another life

by cluelessclown



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: F/M, anyway this is ridiculous but it's one of those parallel lives au, i feel like the rest of the rogue one crew will pop up eventually?, in which my inner history nerd feels accomplished
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 15:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9189353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cluelessclown/pseuds/cluelessclown
Summary: "I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times... in life after life, in age after age, forever."What Cassian and Jyn could have been if they had lived in another time, in another galaxy far, far away.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so story time my dudes. I've always been a sucker for parallel lives aus — so I had to write one for Rebelcaptain, whoops. I intend to make this around ten chapters long, each covering a different historical period, with different stages of their relationship and featuring the rest of the Rogue One crew and whatnot.
> 
> Anyway, this first chapter is based on Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, two war photographers from the 30s that I admire deeply. Lovely @sforzindas and I were chatting about how Alt-J's song Taro — which is basically about Capa's death — would fit a Rebelcaptain au really well, and she made this gorgeous picspam and… well, I somehow ended up writing this. So yep, I hope you guys enjoy it!

Indochina, 1954.

_indochina, **capa** jumps jeep, two feet creep up the road_

_to photo, to record meat lumps and war_

_they advance as does his chance, very yellow white flash_

_a violent wrench grips mass, rips light, tears limbs like rags_

He still remembers her face. Her bright green eyes, the crease of her lips, her cheeks, flustered in embarrassment the first time they met; he even remembers how it felt like to rub his hands against her bare back at night when neither of them could sleep. They had been young back then, but had already seen so much nevertheless — he in Hungary, she in Germany. Their lives hadn’t been easy, and yet they still had managed to wind up together in a small hotel in Madrid for what seemed like the most idyllic time of his life — even as the world crumbled down, Cassian had been able to find peace in photographing the city during the day and sleeping close to her at night.

“You know,” she had said once, on a cold March morning, as they strode down a small park they had both grown fond of over the past few weeks, “I’ve never really done this before. The whole teaming up thing, I mean.”

“Well, you do make a brilliant teammate, Jyn Erso.” he chuckled, his thumb rubbing against her shoulder. “I mean, the photos are okay, but your company… well, that’s even better.”

“ _Arschloch_.”

But she had chuckled too, and after a group of Russian soldiers were out of sight, she even kissed him before taking his hand again.

They _were_ quite a good team, he reflects now. His photographs were intense, often heart-wrenching, but Jyn’s were purely soulful — he marveled at how she always knew how to capture the most perfect angle and convey such powerful feelings, all with a mere snap of her camera. She would carry her Rollei wherever they went and, in a way, he can’t quite remember what she looked like without it. His most vivid memory is that of her holding it in her hand, waiting patiently for a new instant to capture for the rest of eternity.

He remembers the nights, the days, and everything in between. It’s been over ten years, but he can’t quite wrap his head around the idea that she isn’t a part of his life anymore.

An officer calls, but he’s not listening. Cassian is on his own, as he has been since 1937 — his only company is his camera, kindly nicknamed by Jyn back in Madrid as Kay Two, since his first camera got broken a little before they left Paris — and he grimaces at the sight of dead bodies, at the stink of death that he still hasn’t quite grown used to and, most of all, at the prospect of recording it all when there is no Jyn to go back to afterwards.

But he marches on, nevertheless. And with that, he takes the wrong step and a moment later everything burns around him.

 

_burst so high finally **capa** lands_

_mine is a watery pit, painless with immense distance_

_from medic from colleague, friend, enemy, foe_

_him five yards from his leg, from you, **taro**_

 

She hadn’t wanted to marry him. It wasn’t because she didn’t love him — Cassian gathered as much. She wasn’t ready to settle down, to stop living her life the way she liked to — and he had been okay with it, and promised that he would wait anyway.

But of course, he never got to.

Over the last few months, Jyn and his camera had become the two most important things in his life. The latter was his job, his destiny and his one-way ticket to travelling the world; the former was the only passion he’d give up all his travelling and photographing for.

“I don’t want us to give up anything,” she had said quietly. “Because if we do, we’ll resent each other, eventually. And I love you too much for that.”

His entire body is searing with pain as he is taken back to the field hospital, but he somehow manages to remember how she had caressed his cheeks and kissed his forehead before giving him back the simple, metallic ring that he had offered her a few minutes before.

“I love you, Cassian,” she had repeated. And he knew she meant it, but he also knew that there was no way of talking her out of what she thought.

It takes him a few minutes until he realizes one of his limbs is gone. He is still unconscious, of course, but somehow, in his deep slumber, he knows that he has lost his left leg.

Just like he knew when he lost Jyn, back in July, 1937.

 

_do not spray into eyes, i have sprayed you into my eyes_

_3:10 pm, **capa** pends death, quivers, last rattles, last chokes_

_all colors and cares glaze to gray, shriveled and stricken to dots_

_left hand grasps what the body grasps not, **le photographe est mort**_

 

Morphine isn’t working at all, the doctors would grumble around him, muttering complex medical terms that he wouldn’t quite understand even if he were conscious. But there’s very little left of him at this point — his body is struggling to survive, but his mind is already elsewhere.

He has always wondered whether Jyn felt this way when she died, too.

He wasn’t there when it happened, of course. He was still in Madrid, having tea with Hemingway and Gellhorn and taking pictures of the devastated city that he had grown to know so well. He was trying his hardest to forget about Jyn’s sort of rejection, and photography was, as always, what he resorted to whenever his mind drifted back to the memory of her back when they first met in Paris, or her favourite floral dress that she always wore in Madrid, or how her face would scrunch up in concentration whenever she tried to take a really meaningful picture. Every fibre of his body missed her — and yet he couldn’t bring himself to follow her when she announced she would be leaving for Valencia only a few weeks before.

Perhaps he should have stopped her. Perhaps he should have made up some unconvincing excuse about needing her in Madrid, or perhaps he should have just kissed her and begged her to stay. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, because he knew that Jyn needed some time on her own, and he somehow understood.

But it still hurt to see her leave, and it hurt even more when he realized he would never see her again.

He was told that a tank had crashed against the car she was travelling in, surrounded by wounded soldiers. He didn’t want to believe it at first — he yelled at the officer who told him, angrily smashed his hotel lamp, and then dug his fingernails into the concrete wall until his fingers bled and his vision was too blurred to think properly. And so he had stayed there, limply sat on his bed, quietly wishing for Jyn to walk through the door like she used to when they lived together — but of course, she never came back. Her body was buried by the French Communist Party, and he couldn’t bring himself to attend the ceremony. He was too confused, too stunned to accept the fact that he was going to live a life without Jyn from that moment onwards — that he would never, ever hear her German accent again, and that he would never get to wake up next to her like he had grown used to. He was on his own, and he would be for a long time — at least until his time came.

How ironic it is that he is now gathering his last breaths, huddled in a field hospital bed, just like she had right before she died.

 

_three, point, one, four, one, five, alive no longer my amour, faded for home may of '54_

_doors open like arms my love, painless with a great closeness_

_to **capa** , to **capa** , **capa** dark after nothing, reunited with his leg_

_and with you, **taro**_

 

“Do not spray into eyes,” he recalls Jyn once recited, a shaving cream bottle in her hand, laughing softly as she made her way back to bed, where he was already lying on his back. “Why would anyone spray this into their eyes on purpose?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know.” he chuckled quietly. “I mean, I’m pretty terrible at shaving, but I’ve never gotten shaving cream in my _eyes_.”

“Anyway, I can’t really get this sprayed into mine,” she countered as she crawled into bed, her body resting against his and her chin atop of his.

“Why so?”

“Because I’ve already sprayed you into my eyes, Cassian Andor.”

He had been, in fact, until the very last moment of her life. Just like she had been in his as he drew his last breath on a spring afternoon in Indochina.

 

_do not spray into eyes, i have sprayed you into my eyes_

_hey **taro**_


End file.
